// Mental Health

Your monthly digest of everything happening across Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps — so you don't have to keep up with it all yourself! In this January 2022 roundup, Chris returns to the channel after a break with an honest discussion about mental health and burnout, recaps Cloud With Chris highlights from 2021, and covers a packed set of updates: AKS improvements (containerd GA, FIPS node pools, Kubernetes version aliasing), Static Web Apps Enterprise Grade Edge GA, Azure Cognitive Search semantic updates, Azure Monitor 1-minute frequency log alerts, GitHub Advanced Security, GitHub Projects, Dependabot, and much more. Plus an outlook for what's changing on the channel in 2022.

You will have noticed that there haven't been any updates on Cloud With Chris for some time. I've also been quiet on social media. For any of my colleagues, you may have seen that I've had time away from work by my out of office messages. In this blog post, I want to open up about my recent challenges and have an honest discussion. Whether you've experienced mental health challenges before, are currently going through tough times, or haven't experienced any and don't quite understand - I hope that me sharing this helps. We're going to be talking about mental health.

Chris plays Sea of Thieves with Johnny and Simon while discussing Johnny's upcoming Azure Quantum and Q# book with Apress, Simon's Azure certification journey from AZ-900 to AZ-500, in-person speaking at Welsh Azure User Group, and managing content creator energy levels.

What is Developer Relations, and how do you build a career in it? Chris is joined by Martin Woodward — Director of Developer Relations at GitHub and the person who brought Git to Microsoft — to explore the open source contribution funnel, what drives community leaders, the community-building skills that underpin a DevRel career, and how platforms like GitHub Actions achieve explosive growth through network effects.

A community Among Us stream with twelve cloud professionals discussing Kubernetes trade-offs in production, Windows 365 Cloud PC versus Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Arc for multi-cloud app deployment, game engine choices between Unity and Unreal, and imposter syndrome in tech careers.

Chris Reddington is joined by Dr. Keith McNally, a college professor with over 15 years of teaching experience who leads Microsoft's Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) — a skill-bridge programme helping US military veterans transition into IT careers through Azure cloud training. They discuss project-based learning, how to teach people to think (not just follow procedures), the soft skills civilians take for granted, and what it really takes to bridge the gap between military service and a career in cloud.

Chris is joined by long-time friend Erin Davies — an Agile Coach who accidentally stumbled into tech after applying for what she thought was a buying and merchandising role at John Lewis. Erin shares her journey from studying law and sociology at Warwick to becoming an Agile Coach, offers honest reflections on women in tech and imposter syndrome, and explains what Agile really looks like in practice when you're in the trenches. The episode also explores content creation, starting a podcast, and finding your voice in the tech community.

Chris Reddington is joined by Sarah Lean (Techielass), Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for a deep dive into Azure Arc and hybrid cloud management. They explore how Azure Arc extends Azure governance, policy, and inventory capabilities to on-premises infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, data platforms, and app services across multi-cloud environments. The session then shifts to a candid conversation about life in Developer Relations — what cloud advocacy really entails, how to build a sustainable content creation rhythm, and how to protect your mental health in a role that blurs the line between work and passion.

Mental health and career development are more closely intertwined than people often appreciate. Chris and long-time colleague Glenn Small (Analytics Manager at AWS) share personal experiences of burnout, severe anxiety, and pandemic isolation — and draw out practical lessons for setting expectations, building healthy boundaries at work, and knowing when to ask for help.

Weekly Vlog #20 celebrates hitting 500 YouTube subscribers ahead of schedule, then reviews one of Chris's most content-heavy weeks: Azure Pipelines-as-code tutorials, an event-driven architecture walkthrough using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions, and a candid mental health live stream. The headline Azure announcement is Azure Static Web Apps reaching general availability with built-in CI/CD, serverless API integration, and free SSL. GitHub rounds out the episode with new hardware security key support for SSH operations and native video uploads to issues and pull requests.